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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26792842">The Gloom Run: Why Blaseball Happens</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/InslideBlaseball/pseuds/InslideBlaseball'>InslideBlaseball</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Blaseball (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canada Moist Talkers (Blaseball Team), Hades Tigers (Blaseball Team)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 06:41:00</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>840</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26792842</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/InslideBlaseball/pseuds/InslideBlaseball</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>On participating in the cultural event of Blaseball, and sticking with it when all your faves die.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Canada Moist Talkers Fanfiction</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Gloom Run: Why Blaseball Happens</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>First published 19/09/2020 in the Inslide Blaseball newsletter: https://inslideblaseball.substack.com/p/the-gloom-run-why-blaseball-happens.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p><p>Dear readers. Welcome to another week of looking at numbers crunched by a machine whose exact workings are utterly unknown to us and struggling to derive meaning from that. In other words, welcome to another week of being alive. Things haven’t been very good lately.</p><p>Death is not new to Blaseball, as it is not new to life. My first article on this very newsletter was about a death and what it meant. So is this week’s story and so was last week’s. It’s getting pretty tiring. So let’s not talk of death, but of death transfigured.</p><p>Here’s a story. You walk up to the plate. An umpire looks towards you. Its searchlight eyes glow. You burn up from inside out. You die. It’s not bittersweet, glorious or dignified, but it’s the fate of 72 Blaseball players in the 7 seasons we’ve had thus far. We don’t really know why it happens. We can only guess. It is but the will of cruel faceless gods.</p><p>Here’s another. There were 17 of these incinerations in season 2 and 28 in season 3, 9 in season 4, 2 in season 5, 4 in season 6, 13 in season 7. The increased numbers in season 7 were due to necromancy: the fans conspired to bring the first person to ever be incinerated, Jaylen Hotdogfingers, back to life at the end of Season 6. Jaylen’s a pitcher: their blaseballs ended up destabilizing the players they hit, making them much more liable to be incinerated during a solar eclipse. Worse, the instability spreads randomly once it activates, creating a ripple effect of incinerated and unstable players through the league. Fans can only watch in horror from the stands and hope their favorites, who are constantly glitching in and out of reality, don’t get turned into ashes. This is a direct result of Jaylen coming back from the void: the fans did it, and now they suffer the consequences. We don’t really know why it works that way. We can only guess. It is but the will of cruel faceless gods.</p><p>Not satisfied? Since guessing is all we have, and interpreting these signals is all we have, we make reality of our guesses. So we receive the news about something happening and spin something beautiful out of them. Or try to. The process is often messy and complicated because we care so much about the result. The Hades Tigers’ fans spent hours arguing about Fraisier Shmurmgle — a player who replaced fan favorite Mclaughlin Scorpler — and what exactly they were. Fraisier was incinerated the day after. We don’t really know why or how it happened. We can only guess. It is but the will of cruel faceless gods.</p><p>Wanna hear another? Blaseball is less random, unfair, incomprehensible and existentially annihilating than life itself. That’s why we feel attracted to it. Our only real measure of control over it is how we choose to understand it, but that’s enough because we are not always afforded such luxury outside of the diamond. That, too, is the will of cruel faceless gods — ones that are different, but no less obscure and even more cruel than the Blaseball ones. They provide no solace. But inside the diamond, sometimes, the machine that is the universe turns its gears in just the right way, and we turn in step with it. We witness things that are wonderful and our wonder makes them real. That’s why Blaseball happens.</p><p>One final story: during one of these incinerations, while fire springs up inside them, a batter hits a homerun and dashes across the whole field. They reach home base, and they’re ashes. They were Workman Gloom, hitter for the Canada Moist Talkers, and now they’re ashes. That is the fate of one out of more than two hundred Blaseball players. We don’t really know why or how it happened. We can only guess. It is but the will of cruel faceless gods. We do know it happened, though, so we can fill in the blanks. We can see Gloom’s eyes lock with the Umpire’s. We can feel them stop breathing for a second, the faces of seventy other incinerated players - Gloom has been playing from the start, has known them all - fresh in his mind. Some grit their teeth, some screamed, some cried out the names of their loved ones, some didn’t even realize what was happening. We can feel Gloom’s muscles contract and release, hitting the ball at a perfect angle, sending it hundreds of feet away as the stands explode in cheers, unaware of what’s about to happen. Their legs — our legs — move on their own, barely touching the ground. First base. Time flows on the beat of Gloom’s heart — our heart — as it pumps boiling blood. Second base. We think of death as a dot while it is more like a spiral, a stone thrown into a still lake sending ripples throughout. Third base. Gloom is already history, their run legend.</p><p>Home.</p><p>And it's all right.</p><p>Or, at least, a bit less wrong.</p><p> </p>
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